Eldar are not invincible. they have a weak point, the holo field will be negated in one form or another and their ship will be scrapped. they can be killed, you just need to take the right approach. even solar panels collect heat, so why not have an alternate means of targeting them. or is everyone against admitting that eldar ships can be beaten. the rules on the holo field are abstract enough that something might work. Your GM is to run the game, not dictate the rules of war. in essence there are no rules and by rolls or sound judgment there is nothing out side the the abilities of players to destroy the very fabric of a GM's plot to challenge them. gone are the days of No, any threat can be stopped. and some times all it takes is one monkey wrench.

-Where does it say cruisers can't fire their weapons when they perform any of those 3 maneuvers?

Page 15, battlefleet koronus: "If a ship performs a Manoeuvre Action with a total modifier of greater than challenging it may not fire it's nova cannon in the same turn". Of course, if you can buy a gyro-stabilization matrix from Into the Storm, then you can fire Nova cannon even if you use aforementioned manoeuvres, but it's a rare archeotech.

-Btw another Nova Cannon question just popped into my head. What happens when you use a nova cannon to bombard a planet? =P

Fluffwise - one ship armed with nova cannon can exterminate planet. One shot is not enough to destroy the planet, but consequences still will be awful.

Well, for what it matters, in BFG the Eldar ship gets the normal 2+ Holofield save against the Nova Cannon, which is made once. If the test fails, they take all the hits. This implies that whatever the holofield is doing (it is obviously more than just a visual distortion field), it is effective against nova cannons.

Void_onion213 said:

No, they're not invincible, but working from the precedent of Battlefleet Gothic, and the depiction of starship-mounted Holofields in the novel Shadowpoint, there are very, very few things that can accurately target an Eldar vessel.

The Eldar rely upon evasion, speed and agility to avoid harm. They're exceptionally good at it - if they weren't, they'd be far closer to extinction than they are. It doesn't mean that they're unbeatable... but it shouldn't be easy to defeat them, just as it shouldn't be easy to overcome the brute force, great numbers and reckless enthusiasm of the Orks, or any number of other examples.. The Eldar are, afterall, the survivors of an extremely powerful and sophisticated galactic civilisation armed with advanced technology and (typically) centuries of experience.

Dart Mobius said:

But you said "can't fire its weapons", not "can't fire its nova cannon". Shoulda worded it differently.

WhiteLycan said:

My apologies, typing at 3AM does not lead to excessive accuracy. The point remains, however. An Eldar Frigate will run circles around any cruiser opponent.

Errant said:

As pretty much a joke, my GM dared my group (of 3 players) to take on 2 Memory of Laments (Edge of the Abyss) and if we somehow won he'd give us 10 profit factor (because he was sure we would die. This was after our session was over and we were just dicking around). Well. We have a Tyrant cruiser with an archeotech nova cannon and 4 mars pattern macrocannons (2 port/2 starboard). We opened by firing the nova cannon and crippling one of the eldar's sensors (-30 to BS Tests). A few rounds later, we're at 1 hull integrity remaining and both Eldar are dead. And halfway through the encounter they took out our void shields for 2 rounds. So cruisers can definitely kill eldar.

Btw just for you sticklers out here, he did give us our 10 PF and justified it by saying we sold all the components we salvaged off the 2 ships (we managed to salvage 3 of the lances, 2 holo fields, 1 runecaster, 2 of the star macrobatteries and 1 solar sail) and got a little reward from the local administratum for killing 2 deadly eldar pirates.

Cool stuff WhiteLycan.

Ok going by BFG the Holofield apparently has a bigger distortion radius than the Nova cannon shell explosion radius. -40 it is by that guess.

Nova cannon oneshots a planet, seind in the mining ships. This does give me an idea. Want to mine a deathworld? This is the solution.

A Nova Cannon detonation would probably crack a continent. With all the planetary issues that would entail; massive clouds of dust, tectonic shifting, earthquakes... I think I'd much rather use a cyclonic torpedo or the like to burn off the atmosphere instead.

Errant said:

If you want Mining ships, you really want to break up the planet.

I have no knowledge how a cyclonic torpedo really works, but burning of the atmosphere does nothing about the gravity. Which is what is actually preventing you from using mining ships.

Same reason why a Virus bomb is rather useless if you want to remove the planet as a celestial body.

The Death Star superlaser is quite perfect though. If the Nova cannon has a comparable effect (less spectacular explosion maybe) it is useful.

I am so going to use an Imperial Navy Mars BC to threaten the party with...

"You would prefer another target, a military target? Then name the system!"

guess the the question is, how does a Holo-field protect against a small plasma drive explosion. the Eldar ships possess no void shields and their armor is equal to a transport or Raider. The thing people are describing to counter act the field is using the Nova cannon much like a depth charge, you don't need to know the exact location, just the general area. If problems still persist please get an FFG administrator is give better detail on how the holo field is supposed to work, instead of a loose description that describes the Holo field as a pain in the neck, you really expect people to hit something with a -40 to ballistic skil, and slim to none chance to lock on to it. most solutions are GM's call, not a favorable, or enjoyable encounter if you are forced to work with rules as written. It says nothing about effecting boarding actions, nothing a few well placed det charges won't fix. or would the GM's out there also make that a - 30 to 40 command test.

Void_onion213 said:

Which is the point - the Holofield provides no protection from the Nova Cannon explosion, but it prevents the firer from knowing where the target is.

An Eldar vessel with its Holofield active is almost impossible to hit by any conventional means (it's a 2+ save against anything but weapons batteries in BFG), and extremely difficult to detect or discern with any accuracy - putting a Nova Cannon shell in "the general area" may simply not be enough (consider that you're trying to hit in the general area of an object a few kilometres long which may be literally anywhere within a space several thousand times that size in any direction.

A Holofield disperses a craft's image and sensor signature more, the faster it moves - this is as true for starships as it is for Titans and Harlequins (the main two other users of the technology, though on a much smaller scale in both cases). A starship's holofield undoubtedly produces an effect that spreads over an irregular and constantly-shifting area thousands of kilometres wide.

Meh. Even if the Holo-field's effective radius is greater than the blast radius of a Nova Cannon shell, a Rogue Trader surely has a better chance of hitting an Eldar ship with the Nova Cannon than he does blindly firing shells at where he thinks the ship might be. As an example, if I'm an assassin trying to kill someone in a city, and I don't know where my target is, I can try blowing up part of the city with a tactical nuke. It's a crude and excessive tactic, and I might not get my guy, but maybe I've got a better chance of getting him than if I strolled blindly around the streets hoping to just run into the target. It's not a perfect analogy but you get the idea, hopefully.

Fabian Grax said:

Doesn't matter - space is incredibly vast. It's more akin to dropping a nuke on a planet hoping he will be under the area of effect, when he could have been on a different continent.

The Eldar long ago abandoned armor for misdirection because weapons got too powerful for armor to matter significantly, and they are masters at it. Battlefleet Gothic gives Eldar the Holo-Field effect vs all weapons, Nova Cannon included, because it is that effective at feeding your sensors misinformation. Your explosion might be a thousand kilometers in volume, but the Eldar might be several thousand kilometers from where you fired.

My best guess about holo-fields is that they can temporarily create illusions of where the ship is, both optically and signal based, that vary in accuracy based on recent actions of the Eldar ship. You get the effect of a 'jumping' ship, that appears to be at once spot on sensors and then suddenly appears elsewhere as your sensors pierce the ruse. How long this information you are given is accurate is effectively random, meaning any given attack is at a -40% as a general rule.

cobrausn said:

Ah-ha, but the problem with your argument is that despite the vastness of space we must assume that, given that it is difficult but STILL POSSIBLE to shoot an Eldar ship with a holo-field, a starship Captain can still overcome all that witchcraft and hit the Eldar ships with lances . Now, I'm sure the beam of a lance would seem fairly wide to an observer, but in space that's nothing. Even so, the fact that it is POSSIBLE for a captain to hit such a sneaky target with a (relatively) pinpoint weapon means that he can make a pretty good guess at where it is. In fact, I'd say that despite the Eldar's holo-field displacing the ship's location by thousands and thousands of miles, a good Captain can probably narrow it down to an area of several hundred miles or even less.

Guess what? That's close enough for the Nova Cannon. Eldar loses. Praise the Emperor. Death to pointy-eared bastards. Etc.

Point is, you can hit an Eldar ship with ease. (With a lance)

BS 100 minus 40 still is more than enough for the Voidmaster to finish it off in a single salvo.

The depth charge comparison is quite apt. Want to know how many of them hit? Depth charges never achieved more than 7% (hit rate) (yadda only the wiki).

I think that Nova cannons have apretty good chance at killing Eldar ships, as opposed to depth charges. Depth charges dont cost an arm and a leg though.

But still it is a weapon that has a 19% chance of critting per hit, with 1d5 hits in a huge area, and 1d5+2 if you hit a target. With a bit of luck you can have enemies: blind, on fire, and losing air all at once.

Hygric said:

Yes, but you have to live with the repercussions if I capture it...

So, what if I took the penalty from the Holo Field, made a Augury test, located which VU the eldar ship was in (if the test is successful), then fired my Nova Cannon at said VU. Hard to argue against that course of action.

WhiteLycan said:

I actually think this is a far better solution than anything else I've seen. The point is that the holo-field applies no matter which course of action you take, which is the precedent set by BFG, and this handles it very well.

cobrausn said:

i agree you still using the penetly while saving the ammo if you fail lock on. the problem with this is it creates an opertinity for signifigent abuse of the system if you aplie this to batteries making them far more leathal to elder then they were intended to be an frankly i do not see why you people are so worked up at -40 you still probly have better odds to hit then npc vessle so whats the big deal rember elder ships can't take much punishment an with low armor and no shield all you need is a handful of hits to criple them

Xerty said:

I would only apply this to Nova Cannons. I would say the Augury test only pinpoints the location to within a few hundred kilometers - enough for a nova cannon, not enough for a battery barrage.

The Eldar long ago abandoned armor for mobility and misdirection. They realized that when you start flinging around weapons with enough energy to exterminate life on planets (like, oh, a Nova Cannon) that armor doesn't matter so much. So their technology shifted in a very specific direction, one that promotes mobility, misdirection, and attacking power over armor and toughness.

I don't mind, I usually play as Eldar or IG in GW games. For some strange reason people get angry when fighting Eldar. They understand that they are supposed to represent the pinnacle of technology (I'd say the rules don't accurately reflect this, but it doesn't really matter too much) but they still get angry when their shooting doesn't affect them. They will fire six lascannons at a 14 armor Land Raider and say '****' when they fail to penetrate armor. They fire the same six lascannons at a skimmy Eldar main battle tank with holo-fields and fail to kill it and they cry 'cheese'. Something about the Eldar just makes people angry. I use it to my advantage.

It's because they're elves ...

Space Elves . >.>

Space Elves that can, if they're so inclined, take advantage of their Unnatural Agility and piloting skills to undertake such radical Evasive Maneuvers that they're untouchable, depending on your interpretation of "-60 is the largest penalty you can receive to a test".

cobrausn said:

Checks battlelog for lost battle against Eldar due to cheese.

Entry 3rd edition: Mindwar 7times until all threats are dead. No entries past that.

Check Battlelog for Land Raider destruction.

Apply Melta, threat negated.

Taking lascannons is when to want to kill Rhinos. Everything else is Melta these days.

(BTW Space Marines of any type are not quite correctly portrayed as well, but you dont want your 25 aspect warriors to be killed by only 5 of them either?) I really like the rules as they are, quite unlike some of the fluff.

cobrausn said:

Hrmm warfare has shifted in this direction since WW2. So basically sometime during the Dark Age of technolgy humanity invented armour (ceramite and adamantium) that made tricks like holofields rather useless.